Friday, 25 December 2015

The Ancient & Modern Woman in the Moon

I gazed at the last Christmas Full Moon, in 1977, from
the window of a Swiss hotel where I was becoming radicalised, working a 20-hour
shift as a waitress. More deserving of concerted efforts at memory was that
mystical Christmas Eve of 1968, when I was as enraptured as all of us humans
waiting for Apollo 8 to return from our species’ first ever flight round the
dark far side of the moon.

Ten orbits and a spine-chilling reading from Genesis
broadcast to Planet Earth later, as an eight-year-old also waiting for Santa,
the moon became associated for me with incredible excitement. Santa welded with
the Man in the Moon, and my brain has confused his chariot with a NASA space
rocket ever since.

Selene drives her winged horses

After handing in my notice in
Switzerland (hard, because they confiscated all Gastarbeiters’ passports) I
went to university and discovered one of the biggest cons of all time: the
inhabitant of the moon whose face you can sometimes see is not male at all but
female. Plutarch (who has had a moon crater named after him as reward) wrote a
treatise with the catchy title Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon. It has been very important in the history of
science, as an inspiration for Johannes Keppler in his early 17th-century
Somnium, the first serious study of
lunar astronomy. But Plutarch’s text quotes a Greek poet who saw in the moon ‘a
maiden’s face, with moistened cheeks, which blush to meet the gaze.’

Selene with Crescent Moon hat

Long before the Greeks merely
associated the moon with Artemis, Diana/Cynthia/orHecate, they actually personified her as Selene, a disturbing,
beautiful name of high antiquity stretching back to early Indo-European hunter-gatherer
times. Selene, like Santa, had a chariot; sometimes she rode horseback. She had
a great love life, since her boyfriend, the good-looking cowherd Endymion, was
kept eternally young and asleep in a cave awaiting their next erotic encounter.
She had exciting children including the Dew, the Months, and the poet Mousaios
as well as the exquisite Narcissus and the dangerous Nemean lion.

"Honey, wake up. I'm ovulating!"

As a Briton I am proud that
the idea that the goddess’s train of escorts were in fact green seems to have
been the invention of the English showman Elkanah Settle, whose spectacular
musical The World in the Moon (1697)
included five green men dancing in Cynthia’s lunar court, to music by Daniel
Purcell.

Lunar Crater 'HYPATIA'

But as a woman I am more
impressed that according to the official Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
maintained by the International Astronomical Union, amongst the tiny proportion
of moon craters named after women, the ancient astronomer Hypatia does at least
feature alongside Plutarch and Aristarchus etc.

Elfie begins her Lunar Escapade

And as soon as I have made the mince pies and finished
trying to peer behind the clouds atop my wold to see the moon, which will be at
its fullest shortly (11.11 GMT), I am going to return to Feminist Adventures in
Lunar Lore. I am reading Frances Vescelius Austen’s Elfie's Visit to Cloudland and the Moon, partly based on Lucian’s thrilling
moon-travel story in his True Histories.
Austen’s novel antedates L. Frank Baum’s The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by several years, and thus may lay claim to
feature the first female quest heroine in modern literature.